Srivijaya 3.0 (17): The “Chola Invasion of Srivijaya”

Ok, so where was this Srivishajam/Srivijayam/Srivishaya/Srivijaya that the Chola captured?

Let’s look at the context. By that, I don’t mean the “Srivijaya myth” context, but instead, the context that I have been developing by deconstructing Cœdès’s theory and developing new ideas from re-examining the primary sources.

1. Much of the “history” of Cœdès’s Srivijaya is built on information in Chinese sources that Cœdès believed were about a “Kingdom of Srivijaya at Palembang,” however, they were not, and I have documented this on this blog and in a long article.

2. When you take away the information in Chinese sources that Cœdès erroneously thought was about “Srivijaya,” the only historical information for a place around Palembang that we are left with are some inscriptions from a single decade, the 680s, that mention that term.

3. Meanwhile, Arabic sources make it clear that Kedah was indeed under the authority of another polity. They refer to that polity as “Jāba/Zābaj” and to its ruler as the “Mahajaja of Jāba/Zābaj.”

4. Descriptions of Jāba/Zābaj/Shepo in Arabic and Chinese sources strongly (I would actually say “irrefutably”) point to the area of Songkhla as being the most likely location of its “capital.” They also make it clear that Kedah was its most important “vassal.”

5. In the above inscription, it certainly looks like Srivishayam/Srivijayam was a royal “capital,” given that it is mentioned first and it is described as having gates and wealth (“treasure”).

6. We have no evidence that the people who lived in, and those who ruled over, the place that foreigners called “Jāba/Zābaj/(and Shepo in Chinese)” actually called their home by that name. In fact, we have no idea how they referred to the place they lived.

7. We have historical evidence of people following itineraries that crossed the Malay Peninsula in the seventh, ninth, and thirteenth centuries, but no evidence of people following itineraries around the Malay Peninsula by sea until. . . perhaps Zheng He’s voyages in the early fifteenth century (?). I’m not saying no one ever did that prior to that time, just that we have no historical evidence of that, but instead, have historical evidence of people crossing the Malay Peninsula, as apparently, that was much more common than historians have realized.

8. There is abundant evidence that shows that the northern half of the Malay Peninsula, where the trans-peninsular crossings were, was a place that various peoples all sought to control (as least parts of): Mon, “Jāba-nese” (whoever they were), Khmer, Javanese, and later, Siamese.

9. Malaiyur/Malayu, one of the places that the Chola captured was definitely not Jambi on the island of Sumatra, as many historians believe. By re-examining the primary sources, I place it in what is now Phang Nga province in Thailand.

10. While it is difficult to identify with certainty many of the places the Chola navy attacked/captured, the ones that we are able to identify were all part of the trans-peninsular trade network, which, as far as we can tell, was dominated in the early eleventh century by Jāba/Zābaj/Shepo.

Given all of the above, I would argue it is 1,000% logical to equate “Srivishaya/Shrivijaya” with “Jāba/Zābaj/Shepo.”

[For readers familiar with the inscriptions, this Chola inscription makes me think that the Ligor inscription is probably also from Jāba/Zābaj/Shepo, but I have no idea how/if the Sumatran inscriptions from the 680s relate.]

As I said, we do not know how the people in Jāba/Zābaj/Shepo referred to the place where they lived, but we do know that it had authority over Kedah, and we can guess that people in the Chola kingdom probably knew how the ruler of Jāba/Zābaj/Shepo referred to his polity or the city from where he ruled.

This is because we can see in other Chola inscriptions that prior to the attack, there was close contact between the Chola kingdom and the rulers of Srivishaya/Srivijaya. In particular, the rulers of Srivishaya/Srivijaya made various donations for religious sites, etc. It would therefore make logical sense that a more accurate term for their polity would appear in these inscriptions than in accounts compiled from information gleaned from Arab and Chinese merchants, men who did not have actual contact with the rulers of Jāba/Zābaj/Shepo.

Based on all of the above, what I see in the “Chola invasion of Srivijaya” is a Chola attempt to gain control of the trans-peninsular trade routes from a place they knew as Srivishaya/Srivijaya, but which other foreigners referred to as Jāba/Zābaj/Shepo.

In other words, this was another episode in the long ongoing struggle to control trans-peninsular trade networks that we can find repeated evidence of from the 9th-15th centuries involving Mon, Khmer, “Jāba-nese,” Javanese, and Siamese.

Indeed, what we can see from all of this is that prior to the fifteenth century and the rise of Melaka and the Zheng He expeditions, the main action in Southeast Asia was on the northern half of the Malay Peninsula, not down in the Straits of Melaka. That’s why the Chola kingdom attacked and captured places in that region.